Monthly Archives: December 2010

After more than one year without writing almost anything related to my other pet project “frogr“, I finally found some time, motivation and energy to put all the loose parts I already had more or less in place together and evolve them towards what finally made a new release of this -yet another- GNOMEflickr uploader.

That way, I finally released frogr 0.3 two days ago (see the announcement here), featuring the following changes:

Replaced flickcurl(synchronous, libcurl based) with flicksoup (asynchronous, libsoup based) as the backend library for dealing with the Flickr API.

Improved authentication process and made it more “seamless”, so the application is more aware now of the potential issues that might happen, reporting them to the user if needed (e.g. asking the user to re-authorize the app).

Better error handling and reporting, not only about the authorization process but about everything about the user-flickr interaction, which made it way more user-friendly (e.g. quota limit exceeded, host unreachable, process cancelled by the user…).

Added support to allow cancelling uploads (no more closing the application if forgotten to do something before pressing ‘Upload’!).

Added support to allow setting pictures to be added to albums after the upload process. So far, only adding to already existing albums is available, but for the next release allowing the user to create albums on the fly is also planned.

Menubar redesigned, so no options get hidden in the contextual menu (did you know there was one?).

Updated translations… errr… well… updated THE only translation we have so far (es_ES). Doesn’t it make you feel like tranlating frogr to your beautiful language? C’mon, it’s a really small file with just a bunch of strings!.

Simplified code both in frogr and flicksoup, which should ease a lot future enhancements in next releases of frogr, as former design was blocking quite a lot of things until I changed it once and for all.

Lots of bugfixes and several minor improvements.

From the point of view of the end user, perhaps it’s a bit strange to even mention the flickcurl/flicksoup change in the list of features above, but I couldn’t help it since that was the biggest change since 0.2 and what I consider the most important one, since it allowed (or just helped a lot, as you wish) that the rest of points actually happened in the way I thought it would be the right one: through a GNOME-ish library which would allow implementing asynchronous operations without the need of using threads (thanks to the mainloop and implementing the methods using the GIO’s GAsync functions), as well as properly reporting errors through GErrors, as it’s commonly done in these kind of applications.

I must say flickcurl is still a great C library which currently implements 99% of the remote flickr API, but for this project I found it too complicated and limited for the kind of things I’d like to do in frogr, which was leading me in many ocassions to work things around in many ways that wouldn’t be necessary if it was a GObject library based in libsoup, instead of a C library based in libcurl. And that’s why I decided to start its implementation, back in February 2010. Unfortunately, the library is not mature enough yet to be separately released, so for the time being I’m just developing it along with frogr, so I can at least release the application, and keeping the intention of release it separately at some point in the future. Still, you can grab the latest code from its own repository if you want to use it separately, where I regularly dump all the changes I do to it through frogr. But I must warn you, it just implements a few functions so far, those strictly needed by frogr, so don’t expect a complete libsoup based version of flickcurl yet, which is far more mature and full of features than this one.

[UPDATE 03/06/2011]: Today I removed the flicksoup repository from gitorious since the truth is that at the moment is not an independently maintained library and what I was doing at the end was (i)regularly dumping files from frogr repo to the flicksoup one. And this, apart from being tedious and usually out-of-sync, was also an issue from the point of view of some distros (like Fedora) when it comes to package frogr, so I decided to go ahead and remove it for the time being. Hopefully in the future flicksoup will be released as an independent library, but as for now it is just part of frogr (although I will keep the whole picture in mind when developing changes for flicksoup inside of frogr). More details in this bug

So far, there are only a few of pre-compiled 32-bit packages for ubuntu and fedora in there (those I generated myself, basically), but hopefully this manual effort could stop being needed at some point in the short terms thanks to the efforts of my mate at IgaliaAlberto García, who kindly already packaged for debian and asked for its inclusion in the project. Thanks, Berto!

First of all, this was the second time I attended to this hackfest (I “kind of” attended last year hackfest as well) but now things were pretty different for me, basically because one year ago I was not part of the IgaliaWebKit team yet, hence my contributions in the hackfest were pretty small (see my post back then for more details). However, this time I attended full-time to the event and I must say I’m really proud of the work I’ve been doing right there, which I hope will eventually lead to the resolution of this WebKit metabug, which was about fixing bugs blocking ORCA support from WebKitGTK based applications.

But fortunately, the work I’ve been doing during the last week was just a pretty small and humble contribution compared to all the work that has been done by the rest of the people attending to the hackfest, like fixing GTK3 and GObject Introspection issues, fully integrating in libsoup all the new cache stuff written for WebKitGTK (which eventually lead to removing the equivalent code from WebKitGTK, as my mate Sergio told some weeks ago, as soon as some bots upgrade to the latest version of libsoup), adding support for profiling in JavascriptCore, implementing some missing and advanced features into the DumRenderTree (aka DRT, the so beloved tool for writing functional tests), fixing spell-checking support… and bugfixing in general (as well as, most likely, lots of other things I’m failing to recall right now). You can read Diego’s blog for more details on those.

Other than that, there was also time for working in Epiphany were some notorious fixes and improvements also happened. Those I can remember right now are the new error pages for epiphany, the implementation of a certificates viewer and new font preferences, getting rid of GConf in epiphany-extensions and general bugfixing tasks. As you can easily understand, as the devoted and committed Epiphany user that I am, I’m pretty excited with these improvements as well. Not needed to say anything about this patch committed at the beginning of the hackfest, I guess, in my opinion this is one of those cases where a picture is clearly worth a thousand words:-)

So, as you can see it was a quite productive week after all here in Coruña!

Last but not least, I’d like to specially thank The GNOME Foundation for sponsoring the event, as well as Igalia and Collabora for helping make this possible once again. Hope we can repeat it next year, and that more people will join the event to help making WebKitGTK an even better web engine for the GNOME platform.

This is a short post just to let the world know about my last pet-project, which I managed to name, after several hours struggling, WebKit Watcher.

WebKit Watchers is a really simple and minimalistic application that allows you to easily monitorize the status of the WebKit buildbots as you would do it through build.webkit.org, but from your Android powered device.

As I said, a really simple application that I wrote as part of my weekly hackfest time here at Igalia to satisfy my curiosity about trying out the Android SDK now I got a new phone while, at the same time, scratching an itch I had.

Next steps for following versions would probably go through adding some kind of support for periodical checks and notifications when some buildbots are red, adding support for non-core builders (while allowing the user to filter them out anyway, in case he/she wouldn’t be interested in those), and things like that…

By the way, I’m open to suggestions (and patches too), after all it was licensed as a Free Software project you can grab through several ways:

Android Market: just look for “webkit”

The .APK file to install by copying to the device: grab it from my web at Igalia